


Never Pure and Rarely Simple

by ljs



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-13
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-21 00:49:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2449163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ljs/pseuds/ljs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A brief scene after "Kill the Moon" and before 8X08, "Mummy on the Orient Express." (Twelve/River in memory.)</p><p>The Doctor takes a moment to go to Paris to relax. He's always loved Paris, but he hasn't been to 1900 yet. You meet the most interesting people there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Pure and Rarely Simple

As soon as the Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS, he realized he had made a mistake.

One should never come to Paris alone.

The sunlit air – he inhaled: 1900, spring – was perfumed. Of course he’d landed in the Jardin du Luxembourg, so no wonder the place smelled of green youth and lovers. Stood to reason. Paris.

He shoved his hands in his pockets, his heavy boots pressing hard as he strode onward, his coat fluttering with that hint of red as the light wind touched him. He was remembering–

Running hand in hand with Romana through the streets of Paris. Dancing with Reinette not so very far away, in a candlelit Versailles haunted by clockwork things, something he needed to remember more about…. Bringing River here later and earlier, taking her down into the ossuaries (and finding and stopping a strange, cavern-pale, lost alien in the process, one intent on sucking dry the Seine through its infiltration of Parisian wells). River did so love a tomb. Had loved.

The thought was sore. He’d mentioned River to Clara recently – was it recently? He’d rather lost track – and since that casual use of her name, he’d felt her loss like a nagging headache, like unfamiliar pressure behind his eyes and in his chest. He supposed he always would. Time didn’t heal a Time Lord, really, and even this regeneration didn’t seem to have wiped that hurt away.

Profoundly inconvenient.

“Hey!” said a small boy, cannoning into the Doctor’s legs. The Doctor steadied him, handed him over to the flapping-armed nurse chasing the child, and waved them away for what he assumed would be scolding and cakes. The small encounter made him look around at the garden and its humans. There were lovers over there, more children over here, a few dark-clad old men moving slowly across the ordered paths.

These people weren’t small to him, no matter what Clara had shouted at him in her last fine rage. He had been too shocked to explain, to figure out what had gone wrong where. He could read all the languages in the universe, but he couldn’t quite read that impossible companion of his.

Or rather, no longer his companion. No, his companion for one more trip – she’d just left a phone message indicating something last trip something, she had been babbling and he had been working out an especially tricky equation when the TARDIS had played the voicemail– but then they’d be done.

He had chosen this quick trip to Paris to relax before picking up Clara: he felt reasonably sure he once had planned on retiring here. Of course he’d also once imagined he’d enjoy being a curator. All the contact with loud, complicated humans that would involve, and he’d have to be… pleasant. Possibly even sympathetic. He shuddered at the thought. It was often so much work to express what he felt, and –

“I’m sorry,” came a cultured male voice from a nearby bench, “did you say something?”

The Doctor turned. The owner of the voice was sitting down; he didn’t look at all well. The man had once been big, the Doctor noted, but what was left was wrecked, aged by time and grief. Still, he had a certain threadbare elegance even in the ruin. He didn’t appear to be Parisian, though. There was something of the outsider in his demeanor and voice, but the Doctor couldn’t quite place it.

“I can’t… I can’t hear sometimes. But I thought you spoke,” said the man. 

Spring 1900. A ruined, elegant exile, craving the sun. Ah, of course.

This time sympathy came without the Doctor having to dig for it. “I don’t think I said anything,” he said. Then, hesitating, because apparently he did talk to himself a lot, Clara had made several pointed comments: “What did you think I said?”

“I couldn’t tell.” The man tapped his ear, then winced. 

“Right. I’m sorry.” The Doctor half-smiled. “Do you mind if I sit with you for a moment? Catch my breath?”

“Certainly, my dear man. But I must say,” and bravado brightened his voice, “you’re not my type.”

“Nor are you mine,” the Doctor said, and now his smile was full and easy. “It’d be an honor to sit with you, regardless.”

“Me, sir?” said the man, even as he made room on the bench.

“I’ve been having a bit of trouble with lies recently. Your writing has given me food for thought on the subject.” This itself was half a lie, but justified, the Doctor thought. And then he thought about lies that were true, and truths that others (Clara) thought were lies, and he sat down heavily on the other side of the bench.

“Do you refer to my earlier essays, or my plays?” said the man warily.

The Doctor hastily changed what he was going to say about _De Profundis_ – written but not published yet; spoilers, River said in his mind – and managed a dry, “Both.”

“The man who wrote those is and is not the man beside you.”

“I understand better than you know,” said the Doctor, and stopped there before he went too far.

The air was perfumed, and full of the music of falling water: the Medici Fountain was nearby, the Doctor knew, and he thought of art, of myths and losses and discoveries. He stretched out his legs, crossed them at the ankles, and then crossed his arms as he gazed unseeingly at the spring day.

“Are you a traveler?” said the man.

“Yes.”

“I hope to go to Italy soon,” said the man. “For my health.”

Spring 1900. The man wouldn’t live to see another spring. The Doctor said as gently as he could, “Italy’s lovely. But Paris is the place to retire.”

“I imagine I’ll come back. The story of my life seems to demand it,” said the man. He gestured once, wearily, and let his hands fall.

The Doctor looked up, looked at light filtering through new leaves. “Stories shape us, or so I’m often and annoyingly told. Whether or not they’re true.”

“Well, you know what they say about truth,” said the man, on a dying laugh.

“I know what _you_ say about truth: it’s rarely pure and never simple.”

“A character said that, my dear man. I didn’t.”

“Did you not?”

The music of falling water and the shouts of faraway children was the only reply.

Then the man brushed at his coat, and struggled to his feet. The Doctor put out a hand to help, but it was just too late: he’d made it by himself. “You’re too clever and I’m too tired for double-edged conversations in the middle of the afternoon. I have lived long enough to know myself,” said the man. Then, speaking in a rush, “But I also know that’s a prodigiously elegant coat. Even with the solecism of omitting a tie.”

“I like it,” said the Doctor, and he too rose. “Thank you, Mr. Wilde. Thank you for the good thoughts.”

“Good?” said Wilde, with a twinkle in those otherwise lightless eyes.

The Doctor smiled. Oscar Wilde had often objected to that term in his essays. “Beautiful, then. Charming.”

Wilde bowed, with a painful grace that had been hard-won. The Doctor returned the courtesy, and watched the ruined man walk toward the sunny side of the path.

Then, his hands out of his pockets and moving in symbolic patterns, the Doctor turned around 360 degrees in place, breathing deep of Paris. It had an ethos, no, a _bouquet_. That was the word he wanted – even if it had been Romana’s word first.

He thought of the Metro, and holding hands with a dear friend. He thought of candlelight shimmering over warm wood in a palace as he danced a stolen dance. He thought of kisses in the dark full of bones, and River fading away from him because he hadn’t known her.

He closed his eyes.

He’d take Clara to the Orient Express – the impossible one in space, there was some mystery there, he’d had messages. That was the way their story would end, he thought: travelling on a thing both real and not-real.

“The question is… the question is, whether or not I tell her. But then I don’t know there’s actually anything mysterious going on other than random phoning from anonymous entities that have my number, and yes, true, occasionally phone calls send one to rob a bank or whatever, but… What do I _know_ , really?”

He couldn’t answer himself. Fair enough.

“Oh, sweetie,” said a voice in his mind, low and amused. He always had amused his wife. 

“I’m not lying. I think,” the Doctor said aloud, “I hope,” and smiled at memory and Paris before he left.

One should never go to Paris alone. But he never was alone, not really.


End file.
